Boeing, and the News

March 14, 2019

It's interesting that China was the first country to ground the Boeing 737 Max, while United States was the last one.

I remember that when China grounded the planes, the US media, seems to think this is over reacting. Yes, media is powerful and can sometimes have big influence on people.

In both China and US, we have seen fake news spreading around and causing big problems. Of course nobody is making fake news about this airplane, however, the opinions matter. We are so busy every day and we don't really have time to investigate the details. So I assume most people rely on the news to process the raw news, extract information, i.e., most of the time, the opinions, for them. I have seen many people talking about the opinions from the news/report/article they read without realizing that it may be biased. Sometimes I do that as well.

So, we do need something to process the news, otherwise we won't be able to do much. I don't have a solution but I see some interesting directions.

The first question is, can we get unbiased raw data/news? Maybe not quite easily. Somebody will have to write down the information for us to process and there's no guarantee that we can get unbiased data. It would be an interesting task to process the information we get and make it less biased, or extract the unbiased data if possible.

The second question is, can we predict the opinions of some particular media? Base on the past data, we might be able to know someone's taste. This may not be quite useful individually but it would be interesting to aggregate the group behavior.

The final question is, can the machine process and extract important conclusions for us, personally? This again comes back to the problem of finding out our taste, personal taste, or preferences. Apart from the raw data, there is nothing unbiased, it's just a matter of how we would like to use the data. I would say this should be personalized base on what we need.